winter_rules

Man that stinks. Yet another longer term ripple effect of this shut down. My wife is also a teacher and we’re curious to see what happens next school year, both in terms of position cuts and the overall school schedule/mechanics of going to school.

Dumb question: Can someone explain, in layman’s terms, how the government can just create several trillion dollars seemingly out of thin air? I live in a simple world where a dollar is a bartering measure, just like a bushel of corn was back in the day. If you think your product/service is worth 2 dollars/bushels of corn and I agree, then I give you the corn/dollar in exchange for the product/service. I always assumed the nation’s debt was in the form of actual debt to bond holders/investors/other governments. Does the debt really even exist if we can just create massive sums of money with the passage of a bill? It’s not like someone just stepped in and offered TRILLIONS of dollars that we can now pay back with interest, right? Any good links to reputable sources that can explain this?

This seems inevitable, unfortunately.

I agree. There is a general resistance to change in any society/industry, but now that almost every society/industry in America is being forced to use as much automation as possible, eyes are being opened to the convenience and efficiency of it and there’s no going back. Goodbye to many brick and mortar stores. Not just because of this immediate hit to sales in the short term, but because less people will be going back into stores in the next 6-12-24 months than were going before this all started. With that said, I do think (hope?) restaurants will boom for an extended period when they open back up, as long as that happens fairly soon and the economy isn’t totally destroyed.

My wife (and therefore I) went through a similar scenario in the same timeframe. Graduated from college in 2007, but she didn't get a full time teaching job until 2012. Schools were either laying off teachers or not replacing those who retired. Then when things started improving, the schools had to offer the new openings to all those who had been laid off first. She kept taking long term sub positions (Pulaski and APW) and eventually earned a full time classroom teaching position. Like BW said, it was tough on her confidence. Teaching elementary kids is definitely the perfect career for her, but she was literally questioning it for YEARS. Wolfie, keep pushing on and you’ll earn yourself a good job!

I certainly don’t blame them at all. It is absolutely a smart move for them. I just wish they would take it a little more seriously. Ripping around on 4-wheelers in the dark, or having bonfires where everybody is drunk, is not exactly a smart move right now. They’ll end up in the hospital for a different ailment and catch it or spread it there.

We live in an area where many old rural farm properties are owned by city slickers from downstate/NYC/NJ/CT. These people are typically only visit their properties for the major summer holidays and the first week of rifle season. There are now multiple vehicles at most of these properties, with 4-wheelers running all over. Vehicles were parked on my property with people fishing my creek....I don’t really mind, but I have never met these people before. It feels like July 4th weekend. This “quarantine” is being treated as a summer vacation for many people. They/we had better hope this virus doesn’t hit hard around here because our little hospital won’t be able to handle more than a few of these cases at a time.